Today the “three worlds” theory is being condemned by honest revolutionary forces all over the world as a reactionary, counterrevolutionary theory. The American “three worlders” have gone completely bankrupt. They have degenerated into open social-chauvinism and anti-communism. They call on the proletariat to ally itself with U.S. imperialism to “direct the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism.” And they are engaged in gangster-style attacks against socialist Albania and the Marxist-Leninist Party of Labor of Albania. This open betrayal is not an unfortunate accident or a quirk, but the inevitable result of years of corrosion by the opportunist trend of neo-revisionism, the trend of the Klonskys and Avakians.
History shows that U.S. neo-revisionism is in the main the American expression of the international opportunist trend of Chinese revisionism. Right from the start, the neo-revisionist corruption was encouraged, given ideological direction and in an all-round way fostered by the Chinese revisionist leaders. The first article in this series showed how the basic struggle in the U.S. Marxist-Leninist movement in the last ten years was between revolutionary Marxism-Leninism and opportunist neo-revisionism and how the Chinese revisionists waged war on the Marxist-Leninists and organized the neo-revisionists into a contingent of their reactionary camp. This article and following ones will analyze a number of the basic neo-revisionist theses and show how they are also theses of Chinese revisionism. These basic neo-revisionist fallacies have provided the theoretical basis for the emergence of the open social-chauvinism of the “three worlders.” The struggle against neo-revisionism is therefore inseparably tied up with the struggle against Chinese revisionism and “three worlds-ism.”
This article will deal with one of the principal neo-revisionist tenets: opposition to the irreconcilable struggle against revisionism and opportunism of all hues. The neo-revisionists conciliate with modern revisionism and opportunism and with every fashionable anti-Marxist-Leninist deviation under the banner of such theories as “opportunism is a middle force to be united with” or under the pretext of fighting “ultra-leftism” and “dogmatism.” Furthermore, it is now perfectly clear that these neo-revisionist lines are precisely those of Chinese revisionism.
This thesis of neo-revisionism, as neo-revisionism as a whole, has always met staunch opposition from the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists. Over the last decade, the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists led by first the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist) and then by the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists (and now by the MLP.USA), have always put the struggle against modern Khrushchovite revisionism and all forms of revisionism and opportunism in the center of their activity. And it is as part of this glorious tradition that the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists are now waging a great irreconcilable struggle against social-chauvinism, “three worlds-ism” and Chinese revisionism.
U.S. neo-revisionism has always speculated with the slogan of fighting “ultra-leftism.” In reality, however, it is the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists who have waged a consistent struggle against adventurism, anarchism, terrorism and left phrasemongering, as well as against Browderite liberal-labor politics and right opportunism and revisionism. The neo-revisionists have prattled on endlessly about the horrors of the so-called “ultra-left” only to raise a yellow banner under which to fight Marxism-Leninism and to systematically denigrate and belittle the struggle against modern revisionism and opportunism of all hues.
In the past the neo-revisionists openly polemicized that the “ultra-left” was the “main danger.” For example, Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Union (predecessor of the “RCP.USA”) maintained that: “The main weakness of proletarian revolutionaries and revolutionary organizations...is our infantilism.... This tends to produce two related errors: dogmatism and sectarianism.” (Red Papers 2, 1969, p. 18) And from the beginning, on writing Red Papers 1 in 1969, the RU held that while “revisionism, or right opportunism” may be the “main long term danger,” “’left’ opportunism” represents the “immediate danger.” Michael Klonsky and the OL also held that: “While modern revisionism, or right opportunism is the main ideological enemy which confronts the world revolutionary movement, within the newly-emerging communist movement here, the main danger is leftism’ and sectarianism.”[1]
Hence the neo-revisionists replaced the struggle against revisionism with the struggle against “ultra-leftism.” The neo-revisionists only paid lip service to the struggle against revisionism. The struggle against revisionism was for the rest of the world, but not for the U.S. It was for the long term or for any other time you wish, but not for the present. In order to “prove” these hypocritical and American exceptionalist pseudo-theories, the neo-revisionists have often pointed to the degeneration of the Progressive Labor Party. According to the right-wing prejudice of the Michael Klonskys and the Bob Avakians, the PLP collapsed because it allegedly exaggerated the struggle against opportunism which caused it to land in “ultra-left” extremism and sectarianism. But in fact the important lessons of the degeneration of the PLP prove that the opposite was the case. The PLP failed to settle accounts with the right opportunist, liberal-labor politics of Browderite revisionism. For example, PLP’s numerous trade union programs and its whole agitation made clear the right opportunist stand of the PLP with respect to work in the working class movement and the PLP’s failure to emerge from the liberal-labor traditions fostered by Browderism. Nor did the PLP, for instance, fight the social-democratic, revisionist and anti-communist politics and ideology of New Leftism but declared it “objectively progressive.” In reality, it was to hide its conciliation with revisionism that the PLP sought refuge in wild and provocative activities. Soon the PLP stopped fighting revisionism and opportunism altogether and quickly collapsed into a trotskyite sect.
On the basis of concentrating their fire against the “ultra-left,” the neo-revisionist leaders have protected their own liberal-labor Browderite political line. And they have united with every right opportunist element imaginable – the pro-Khrushchovites, the Castroites, the Titoite yellow journalists of the Guardian, the reactionary cultural nationalists, the trotskyites, etc. – in an unholy alliance against the forces of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. The neo-revisionist struggle against the so-called “ultra-left” has always meant unity with opportunism in war against Marxism-Leninism itself. Therefore, when the Marxist-Leninists called for the unity of the Marxist-Leninists in one party to struggle against the revisionist betrayal, they were viciously opposed by the neo-revisionists who slandered this stand as “ultra-left,” “dogmatist” and “trotskyite,” as “ahead of the masses” who allegedly were “not ready” for the building of the Marxist-Leninist party but were still in the “pre-party stage,” etc. Or when the Marxist-Leninists carry out Marxist-Leninist revolutionary agitation in the working class, as opposed to the neo-revisionist trade unionist pablum, the neo-revisionists denounce this too as “dogmatic,” “turning off the masses” and so forth.
While neo-revisionism has gone through a number of face lifts and now professes to hold that revisionism is the “most dangerous,” this war against the “ultra-left” continues to date.[2] The “CPML” social-chauvinist “three worlders” are viciously maligning anyone and everyone who opposes their social-chauvinism and their anti-Leninist theory of “three worlds” as a “dogmatist,” “idealist,” and a “trotskyite,” and the “RCP,USA” is hysterically raving against the so-called “dogmato-revisionism” of the Party of Labor of Albania and all genuine Marxist-Leninists. As well, the professional conciliators with the open social-chauvinists, Barry Weisberg’s MLOC, has declared the so-called “infantile left” – the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists – to be the most “anti-Leninist” of them all, and hence presumably far worse than the open social-chauvinists.[3]
This view, that in the U.S. movement the problem has been the “ultra-left,” is completely in accord with Browder’s preachings against the “dogmatism” of the American Marxist-Leninists. But this Browderite view has also been directly imported and nurtured from Beijing. From the beginning of their activities, the neo-revisionist big shots have come back from China to lecture about the errors of “the line of all struggle and no unity” with the opportunists, and other forms of so-called “sectarianism.” Numerous opportunist “friends of China,” William Hinton and others, would come home from China after discussions with the Chinese leaders and write books and give speeches against so-called “ultra-left” deviations and “dogmatism,” and in support of the right opportunist fallacies of neo-revisionism such as “the party emerging spontaneously out of the mass movement,” etc.
After the downfall and death of Lin Biao in 1971, the Chinese revisionists began a big campaign against so-called “ultra-leftism” and soon restored to power the ultra-revisionist Deng Xiaoping and co. The Chinese revisionists also began big international gossip campaigns against “ultra-leftism” and the U.S. neo-revisionists stepped up their attacks on revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. In this period, the Klonskyites and other neo-revisionists with a China connection made a tremendous racket about “Lin Biao’s ultra-leftism” in order to attack the Marxist-Leninists. And even now, the social-democratic publicist, Barry Weisberg, is writing diatribes against the “infantile leftism” of the COUSML which he claims “for ten years...followed the line of Lin Piao.”[4]
It should be pointed out that this campaign against the so-called “ultra-left,” fomented in China and pursued by the neo-revisionists in the U.S., was one of the indispensable ideological prerequisites for the formation of the ultra-right, counter-revolutionary U.S.-China alliance over the last decade.
Neo-revisionism has always waged its struggle against revolutionary Marxism-Leninism under the pretext of an allegedly Leninist struggle against the “ultra-left” in order to make it appear that the neo-revisionists too fight at least some sorts of opportunism. But in fact, in both theory and practice it has considered revisionism and opportunism as a “middle phenomenon” that can and must be united with.
According to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, the advance of the revolution and the consolidation of the party require resolute struggle against opportunism and the driving out of the influence of the opportunists from the working masses. The imperialist “liberals,” the social-democrats and reactionary labor aristocrats, the modern revisionists and social-chauvinists of the Khrushchovite, Chinese and other trends, the trotskyites, the cultural nationalists and opportunists of all hues, are agents of the bourgeoisie within the workers’ and revolutionary movement. As Lenin said: “It has been shown in practice that working-class activists who follow the opportunist trend are better defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeois themselves. Without their leadership of the workers, the bourgeoisie could not remain in power.”[5] The prevalence of opportunism can only give rise to the subversion and disorganization of the revolutionary movement, to its betrayal at all crucial moments and to the corruption and destruction of the communist party of the proletariat. Therefore a most determined struggle to win the working masses away from the influence of the opportunists is absolutely imperative to unite the working class and all toiling people in class struggle against the bourgeoisie and advance the revolution. The Marxist-Leninists do not split the workers’ struggles or factionalize the mass movements on the pretext of fighting revisionism. But the struggle of the Marxist-Leninists must be directed at destroying the influence which revisionism and opportunism have in the working class and oppressed masses.
The neo-revisionists, however, advocate conciliation and unity with opportunism and do not agree with stern, consistent, long-term struggle against it. They counterpose to such a struggle vague phrases about “uniting all who can be united against the main enemy.” But they do not clarify with these phrases with whom they are so interested in “uniting” because in fact they are for unity with the opportunists. In both theory and practice neo-revisionism is for unity with and subordination of the revolutionary movement to the sold-out agents of monopoly capital: to the Democratic Party “liberals,” the social-democrats and labor traitors, to the various revisionists and social-chauvinists, the cultural nationalists, the trotskyites, etc.
The neo-revisionists have not only adopted a conciliatory attitude to opportunism in practice, but have directly denied the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the struggle against opportunism as well. This was repeatedly illustrated in sharp relief in the course of the struggle against the social-chauvinist thesis of “directing the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism” that broke out in 1976. For example, at that time the two main neo-revisionist groupings, the “RCP.USA” and the OL (now the “CPML”), engaged in polemics over the question of Stalin’s teachings on the necessity of directing the main blow at opportunism.
In his article “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” J.V. Stalin described the “fundamental strategic rule of Leninism” in this way:
It is the recognition of the following:
1) the compromising parties are the most dangerous social support of the enemies of the revolution in the period of the approaching revolutionary outbreak;
2) it is impossible to overthrow the enemy (tsarism or the bourgeoisie) unless these parties are isolated;
3) the main weapons in the period of preparation for the revolution must therefore be directed towards isolating these parties, towards winning the broad masses of the working people away from them.[6]
And speaking of the strategy in his classic work Foundations of Leninism, Stalin wrote:
Direction of the main blow: isolation of the petty bourgeois democrats, isolation of the parties of the Second International, which constitute the main support of the policy of compromise with imperialism.
These writings of Stalin are testimony to his unfailing loyalty to Leninism. It was Lenin who taught the proletariat: “Opportunism is our principal enemy.”[7] And:
The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism. [8]
If the neo-revisionist “theoreticians” had read Stalin correctly they would have realized the burning necessity to organize a most stern and relentless struggle against revisionism and opportunism of all shades as Lenin also called for. But neo-revisionism drew an opposite conclusion.
For their part, the OL leaders, the learned professors of the “ultra-left is the main danger,” of course did not raise Stalin’s teachings on the “main blow” to strike a blow at revisionism but to justify their own social-chauvinism. They clumsily juggled with the phrase “main blow” to attempt to make a case for their own most traitorous revisionist line of calling on the U.S. proletariat to “direct the main blow at Soviet social-imperialism.” Naturally there is nothing in common between the principled struggle against revisionism and the social-chauvinist alliance with U.S. imperialism on the pretext of fighting Soviet social-imperialism. Indeed in their struggle against modern revisionism the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists have stressed the capitulation of revisionism to imperialism and have flayed the social-chauvinism of the “CPUSA and other revisionists. But just as the Chinese leaders attempt to “justify” their warmongering counterrevolutionary alliance with U.S. imperialism against Soviet social-imperialism under the thinnest pretext of “anti-revisionism,” so Klonsky too follows the same course. While he unites with social-democracy and the opportunists of all sorts, he would have us believe that his alliance with U.S. imperialism is allegedly based on “anti-revisionist” principles! The shameless hypocrisy of the social-chauvinists knows no bounds!
The neo-revisionist “theoreticians” of the “RCP” responded to OL’s social-chauvinist arguments by denouncing Stalin for being wrong about the need to fight opportunism in the first place. The “RCP” brazenly declared: “...the RCP does not agree with the formulation in these articles by Stalin.... The correct stand of Marxist-Leninists is to unite all who can be united against the main enemy...to win over as much of the middle forces as possible and to isolate and expose enemy agents in the course of aiming the main blow at the main enemy.... The question of the main blow, however, is not merely a semantic one. The question is whether or not the workers and revolutionaries of every country direct their fire against the main enemies they face and unite all possible social forces, even wavering ones, against that enemy.”[9]
Thus Bob Avakian and co. openly polemicize against Stalin and Marxism-Leninism by arguing that opportunism should be considered a “wavering” or a “middle force” to be “won over” and united with. This outrageous diatribe against Stalin and the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the struggle against opportunism speaks mountains for the entire outlook, approach and conciliatory spirit which neo-revisionism has always held towards modern revisionism and opportunism of all hues. But this anti-Marxist-Leninist sophistry of the U.S. neo-revisionists is not in the least bit original. It has been lifted word for word from the documents of the revisionist leaders of the Communist Party of China.
In 1956, at a time when the Chinese leaders were praising the renegade Khrushchov in his vile work of, as the Chinese party put it at the time, “firmly correcting Stalin’s mistakes,” the Communist Party of China wrote:
...Stalin put forward a formula that in different revolutionary periods, the main blow should be so directed as to isolate the middle-of-the-road social and political forces of the time. This formula of Stalin’s should be treated according to circumstances and from a critical, Marxist point of view.... Our experience teaches us that the main blow of the revolution should be directed at the chief enemy to isolate him, while as for the middle forces, a policy of both uniting with them and struggling against them should be adopted...efforts should be made to shift them from their position of neutrality to one of alliance with us.... In light of this doctrinaire error, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China...formulated a policy of ’developing the progressive forces, winning over the middle-of-the-roaders, and isolating the diehards.’[10]
Thus, the Chinese leaders threw overboard Stalin’s teachings on the struggle against the compromisers and opportunists by absurdly counterposing this struggle to the need for unity against the main enemy. Rather than discussing the actual issue at stake, they play with the purely verbal contradiction between directing the “main blow” at the main enemy and directing the “main blow” at the compromisers and opportunists. The Chinese “theoreticians” use such vague and bourgeois terms as “middle-of-the-road...forces” in order to confuse everything. With such terms as “middle-of-the-roaders” they mix together such different forces as on one hand allies of the proletariat and intermediate strata such as the toiling peasantry and non-proletarian working masses, the progressive section of the intelligentsia, and so forth, and on the other hand the opportunists, compromising parties and even the reactionary bourgeoisie and imperialists themselves. Furthermore, the Chinese “theoreticians” also lump together indiscriminately with all the other forces the entire “national bourgeoisie” and thoroughly confuse the question of the possibility under certain conditions of a temporary alliance with or neutralization of certain sections of the bourgeoisie in a struggle that is not yet at the socialist stage. Naturally in practice the various types of these “middle-of-the-road” forces are generally mixed together. It takes a hard struggle by the proletariat and its party to sort out these forces, rally the allies of the proletariat behind its leadership and isolate the compromising parties, opportunists, reactionary bourgeoisie and imperialists. Indeed Stalin stresses that one of the key reasons to direct the main blow at the compromising parties is precisely for the purpose of winning over the peasantry, the broad masses of the working people, etc., that is, to win over the intermediate strata. But the whole point of the vague Chinese formulas is to give up the task of fighting for proletarian hegemony and to justify unity with the opportunists or even directly with the reactionary bourgeoisie under the thin pretext of unity with the “middle forces” or “middle-of-the-roaders.” This is why the Chinese revisionists and their followers are fond of such vague formulas as “uniting all who can be united” or “middle-of-the-road...forces.” This is why even when the Chinese revisionists phrasemonger with more proper Marxist terms, they give them a philistine interpretation and use them as equivalents to their usual vague generalities. The Chinese leaders were never in favor of a stern struggle against the opportunists and modern revisionists nor of proletarian hegemony in the revolution.
What the Chinese were demanding in their polemic against Stalin was unity with revisionism and the abandonment of proletarian hegemony. Instead of uniting the people in struggle against the main enemy, a task which includes winning the working class and people away from the influence of revisionism and opportunism, in place of that, the CPC pursued a line of winning over the revisionists and uniting with them under the hoax that revisionism is a middle phenomenon.
This conciliatory policy explains the constant zigzags and vacillations of the Chinese party in the course of the struggle against Titoite, Khrushchovite and other trends of revisionism. This line explains how in the past the Chinese leaders wanted to include the Soviet revisionists inside the “united front against U.S. imperialism.” Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, in 1964, even signed a message to the Khrushchovite traitors declaring that, despite the differences they had with each other (differences that were claimed to be between Marxism-Leninism and modern revisionism!), the CPC and the Khrushchovites would always be on the same side in the end. Even at the time when the Chinese party finally came out and took an open stand against Khrushchov, it still found something good in the ultra-revisionist polycentrism of the Italian revisionists and numerous other renegades.
And today, inside China’s “united front against Soviet social-imperialism,” the Chinese leaders have included along with the U.S. imperialists and the biggest capitalists and reactionaries, the worst revisionist scum as their “comrades,” such as the Titoites and other revisionist dregs in power, and they are increasing their connections with the Italian, Spanish and other Eurocommunists as well.
These developments bring to light the bankruptcy of the Chinese course of conciliation of revisionism. They show in practice the rotten essence of the theory that “opportunism is a middle force to be united with.”
[1] The Call, “Building a New Communist Party in the United States” March-May 1973.
[2] With the rehabilitation of the diehard revisionist Liu Shaoqi and the rapid rightward gallop by the present-day counter-revolutionary ultra-revisionist Chinese leadership and with the rapid and shameless merging of “our own” domestic “three worlders” with social-democracy, even the pretense of the fight against revisionism and right opportunism is being dropped by the Klonskyite “CPML” and similar groups.
[3] See Unite! February 15, 1979. The MLOC/“CPUSA(M-L)” has also recently declared new campaigns against the “left.” For example, for nearly a year now since the latter part of 1979, it has been running a protracted campaign to “Defeat the ’Left’ in Order to Fight Right Deviations.” Once again, the Weisberg social-democratic sect is marching in parallel with the similar campaigns against the “left” currently being carried out by the Klonskyites. These campaigns against “ultra-leftism” have as one of their basic aims to eliminate anything that stands in the way of practical unity with the main social-democratic currents.
[4] See Unite!, Special Supplement, March 1, 1979, p. 3.
[5] V.I. Lenin, “Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International,” Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 231.
[6] J.V. Stalin, “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” Problems of Leninism, p. 142, and in Works, Vol. 6, p. 402.
[7] V.I. Lenin, “Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International,” Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 231.
[8] V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter X.
[9] Revolution, “OL Bloodies Own Nose with Its ’Main Blow,’” February 1977.
[10] Communist Party of China, The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Foreign Language Press, Peking, Third Printing, 1961, pp. 15-16.